In the United States, the high-caffeine beverage with the distinctive logo of two charging bulls about to lock horns is packaged in blue-and-silver cans. In Indonesia, it is sold in brown bottles. “These bottles litter the streets,” Ridwan notes. “We don’t have a recycling system, so when I decided to build a house for my family, I thought I would make them a significant part of the exterior and interior. I’m a proponent of recycling.” His contractor rounded up half of the bottles in garbage dumps in Bandung and the nearby cities of Jakarta, Tasikmalaya and Cirebon over a six-month period. Urbane, the firm Ridwan founded in 2004 after completing his education and working abroad (he holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Bandung Institute of Technology and a master’s in urban design from the University of California, Berkeley), hired scavengers to scrounge up the rest. The metal caps had of course been discarded, so he designed wooden tops for the 30,000 finds.

“The bottles are 60 percent of the façade, and they both direct light into the house and reflect it as if they were mirrors.”

“A typical house in suburban Bandung is made of brick, but ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of owning a home with a resortlike feel,” Ridwan says. “I was attracted to the idea of combining steel painted dark brown and dark woods with the brown bottles. The bottles are 60 percent of the façade, and, especially at sunrise and sunset, they both direct light into the house and reflect it as if they were mirrors.”

The house Ridwan shares with his wife, Atalia, and their two young children is situated on a trapezoidal piece of land and consists of two buildings separated by a courtyard. The entrance to the one-story building Ridwan refers to as the guest pavilion is accessed through a gate that appears to float because it isn’t connected to the brown stone floor or to the drywall ceiling. The whole of one wall and part of a second in this reception area are composed of bottles. This space leads to a living room he infused with light and warmth, using merbau wood from sustainable forests on the ceiling and floor. Accents of red, that exclamation point of primary colors—a carpet, an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair—brighten the room. A sliding door opens above the courtyard, and a low glass window overlooks a swimming pool at the property’s front perimeter.

Bandung houses characteristically have backyards, but the courtyard was more aesthetically appealing to Ridwan, and it offers ecological advantages. “A courtyard house tends to be narrow,” he says. “So much light enters from both sides that we don’t need artificial lighting during the daytime. And water from the pool, blown by breezes, contributes coolness.”

“Ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of owning a home with a resortlike feel,” says Ridwan Kamil.

The architect had a hunch the bottles would provide additional insulation, but he wasn’t sure until a student in the Department of Architecture at Parahyangan Catholic University conducted a formal study to test the temperature in each room of the house. “The research revealed that somehow heat was captured inside the bottles and not transferred into the space inside, especially when there is a gap between a bottle wall and a glass wall, like in all of the upper areas,” explains Ridwan. “This gap gives you an insulating system that totally stops the sun’s heat from transferring inside.” The result is that most of the rooms in the completely air-conditioning-free house remain a comfortable 75 degrees on a warm day.

Ridwan designed and fabricated many elements on-site, such as a white kitchen island made from resin mixed with a soft stone. “The two materials form a subtle pattern,” he says, creating a “harmonious contrast” with the dark wood floor.

At the top of the building are the master suite and Ridwan’s library and study area. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and reads there before going to his office. Behind the couple’s platform bed is a green glass shelf on which Ridwan has placed miniatures of some of the buildings he has admired during his travels, including the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. In the bedroom’s sitting area is a painting of New York City’s skyline by Ian Mulyana, a Bandung artist, titled Manhattan Green.

“I met and married my wife in Bandung, but our love story continued in America,” he says. “I worked in Baltimore and then for an architectural firm in New York City for a couple of years. We lived in Forest Hills, and our first child was born in Queens. Wouldn’t it be incredible to design a building in Manhattan someday?”